Told to cut waste at his Pittsburgh middle school, a 14-year-old measured how much of a page each of four fonts actually covered and found Garamond used 24% less ink than Times New Roman — scaled to the federal government's print budget that came to $136 million a year, and the Government Printing Office wrote back to say it was looking into it

The science fair assignment at Dorseyville Middle School, outside Pittsburgh, pointed in the usual direction: find a way to reduce waste. Most of the class thought about paper.

Suvir Mirchandani, 14, had noticed something else. He was getting more handouts at his new school, and some teachers’ printouts looked visibly darker than others. Everyone talked about recycling paper. Nobody ever talked about the stuff printed on it.

Which was odd, because the ink is the expensive part.

More precious than perfume

The fact that anchored the whole project is one Suvir repeated in every interview: printer ink costs more, drop for drop, than French perfume. Chanel No. 5 runs about $38 an ounce; the equivalent in HP ink can cost up to $75. Per page, ink outprices the paper it sits on.

And how much ink a page drinks depends on the font. So Suvir designed the experiment: take the most-used characters — e, t, a, o, r — print them in the four typefaces his teachers used most (Garamond, Times New Roman, Century Gothic and Comic Sans), and measure how much of the page each one actually covered. He used commercial ink-coverage software, then verified the results the beautifully physical way: printing enlarged letters, cutting them out, and weighing them.

The winner wasn’t close. Garamond — the elegant French typeface with thin strokes, designed in the 1500s — used 24 percent less ink than the heavier faces. Switch the school district’s printing to Garamond, Suvir calculated, and it would save as much as $21,000 a year without changing a single word.

Scaling up to Washington

A science fair project might have ended there. Instead, Suvir submitted his work to the Journal for Emerging Investigators — a peer-reviewed journal founded by Harvard grad students for middle- and high-school research — and the reviewers, impressed, challenged him to go bigger: what would the same switch save the federal government?

The federal government prints on a scale a middle-schooler can barely picture — an estimated $1.8 billion a year at the time, with the General Services Administration putting the ink portion at $467 million. Suvir repeated his analysis on five real documents from five federal agencies and found Garamond would cut ink costs by nearly 30 percent.

The bottom line: $136 million a year in federal savings — plus another $234 million if state governments switched too. Getting on toward $400 million a year, for the price of changing a dropdown menu.

Washington responds, in Washington’s font

The study went globally viral in the spring of 2014, and the government had to say something.

Gary Somerset, spokesman for the Government Printing Office, called the work “remarkable” — and the GPO told CBS it appreciated the suggestion and would take it under review. Which is, connoisseurs of bureaucratic language noted, precisely how such stories end.

The switch never came. The GPO pointed out its real savings program was moving documents to the web entirely — its daily print run of the Federal Register had already fallen from 20,000 copies to 2,500 in twenty years. Typography experts raised fair technical objections too: professional printing measures ink differently than desktop printing, thinner fonts can be harder to read at small sizes, and Garamond’s delicacy costs legibility for some readers. Even Suvir’s own school district, he later admitted, looked at the change and never made it. “It didn’t really catch on,” he said.

Why the story outlived the proposal

And yet the study refuses to die — it recirculates every few years, because the kernel is genuinely good.

Suvir’s insight was not really about Garamond. It was about noticing an invisible input. Institutions had spent decades optimizing the visible one — paper, with its recycling bins and double-sided mandates — while the costlier substance flowed unexamined, priced above perfume, in whatever quantity the default font happened to demand. It took someone unindoctrinated in how documents are “supposed” to look to ask what the letters themselves were costing.

The federal government kept its typefaces. But the 14-year-old got a peer-reviewed publication, a national platform, and the durable honor of having made the U.S. government formally respond to a science fair project. The letters, as ever, did most of the talking — his just used less ink.